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Centripetal and centrifugal language forces in one elementary school second language mathematics classroom

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Abstract

Research on the learning and teaching of mathematics in contexts of language diversity has highlighted a number of common tensions that arise in a variety of contexts. These tensions can be explained by Bakhtin’s characterization of two sets of forces that are present in any utterance: centripetal forces represent the drive for unitary language, standardisation and linguistic hegemony; centrifugal forces represent the presence of heteroglossia, stratification and decentralisation. In this paper, I use this theoretical perspective to examine ethnographic data from a study of a second language mathematics classroom in Canada, in which the students are almost all speakers of Cree, one of the original languages of Canada. My analysis highlights three situations in which the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces is particularly salient: the students’ use of Cree; working on mathematical word problems; and producing mathematical explanations.

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Notes

  1. It is important to note the generality of these ideas. In any interaction, the voice of the other participants always amounts to an alien word. Meaning is always in relation to these alien words. Otherness is not meant only to indicate ‘strangeness’ or ‘foreignness’.

  2. The wider project also involved: a mainstream Grade 5 Anglophone mathematics classroom in which some students had been identified as English Second Language learners (ESL); mathematics lessons from a Grade 5–6 class for new immigrants to Canada in a francophone school; and a Grade 3 French immersion mathematics class.

  3. One reviewer suggested I should have involved Cree co-researchers. This is an excellent suggestion, but not one that I was able to realise, in part because the overall project included four different classes with children from many different backgrounds, and was not intended to focus specifically on Cree students. It would not have been possible, particularly given the limited means at my disposal, to involve representatives of the many different communities represented in the classrooms in which the study was conducted.

  4. Transcription conventions: bold indicates emphasis; colons (:) indicates phoneme extension within a word (one colon for every approximately 0.1 s); (.) is a pause <1.5 s; (2.0) shows a timed pause.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the school, teacher and students who kindly participated in this research. The data collection was funded by SSHRC, grant number 410-2008-0544. I am grateful to Maya Shrestra, Maha Sinno, Adil Dsousa, Jennifer Chew Leung and Élysée Cadet for their work on different aspects of the project.

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  1. Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, 145 J-J-Lussier, Ottawa, ON, K1 N 6N5, Canada

    Richard Barwell

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Barwell, R. Centripetal and centrifugal language forces in one elementary school second language mathematics classroom. ZDM Mathematics Education 46, 911–922 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-014-0611-1

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